plays the seasoned whore Jenny Diver. Various others, including some local drag queens, will :fill the remaining roles. Barton, a well-credentialled modern- dance choreographer, says that creating movement for non-dancers is fine by her. Furthermore, she insists, all these peo- ple can dance; they just don't know it. "A lot of the stuff I've come up with, I got it from looking at them. I'm more interested in the insides of people, and in bringing that out physically. I don't want these dances to be steppy, like a lot of Broad- way shows. I want them to be real." That's consistent with her other recent work: her dancers tear around on naked legs, their emotions pulling them, throwing them. The "Threepenny" actors are on her side, she says. "1' m sure they think that what I do is completely strange, but in a good way." She also has faith in the power of Brecht's text, and Shawn's translation, to motivate their movement. Near the end, Mr. Peachum sings: Men really aren't good, So possibly it would Improve them if you kicked their heads, I truly think it would. Mac and the others kick heads in re- turn, and everyone has a nice, dirty good time. -Joan Acocella PENCILS UP! THE S,A.T,'S WATCHDOG T he Web site of the test-coaching company the Princeton Review in- cludes a feature called the "V ocab Min- ute"-a brief original song whose lyrics are intended to help students memo- rize the kinds of polysyllabic vocabu- lary words that come up on standard- ized exams. The current song is called "Rainy Day S.A.T. Blues #4000." It concerns a test-taker named Billy, who almost doesn't get into the college of his choice (Princeton, of course) because "the company that runs the S.A.T.,/ it was a little nonchalant; / it let those tests get wet,/ causing Billy to get/ a score he didn't earn or want." (Nonchalant: feel- ing or appearing calm and relaxed.) The lyrics allude to the recent difficulties of 32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 3, 2006 the College Board, which in the past few weeks has had to notify more than a thousand colleges that forty-four hun- dred students who took the S.A.T.last October received scores that were too low, some of them by four hundred and fifty points. The problem, the board said, was excessive moisture in some of the answer sheets, which didn't register properly in the scanning equipment of Pearson Educational Measurement, the Iowa company to which the board sub- contracts its S.A.T. grading. The board's problems have also pro- duced some hectic weeks for Robert Schaeffer, who is the public educa- tion director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a nonprofit advocacy group. Schaeffer's telephone has been ringing constantly, with calls from reporters, college ad- missions officers, high -school guidance counsellors, and parents. He has also heard from more than a half-dozen law firms, several of which have been in- volved in other testing cases, including a successful suit against Pearson over scoring errors on a test administered to Minnesota high-school students. Fair Test was founded in 1985, when a friend of Schaeffer's who had been in- volved in battles over standardized test- ing "kidnapped" him, as he put it, and persuaded him to help with a project that ultimately became FairTest. Schaeffer had become interested in testing while working in M.I.T.'s now defunct Edu- cation Research Center. Fair Test's cur- rent headquarters are in a rented house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose owner is a retired high-school guidance counsellor. "Our landlord, like almost all guidance counsellors, hates the S.A.T.," Schaeffer said. In recent years, FairTest has suffered serious financial difficulties. Its bud- get-currently around two hundred thousand dollars a year-is heavily de- pendent on grants from foundations, which have been less generous than in the past. 'We used to have as many as six full-time employees, and our offices were on both floors in the Cambridge house," Schaeffer said. "We're now down to the equivalent of one employee and about a room and a halt" Schaeffer constitutes half of that employee. He now lives in Florida and devotes the other half of his work time to the Cen- ter for Civic Participation, a nonpar- tisan group whose principal concerns include voter registration and election participation-issues that, in Florida, at any rate, also involve machines that , can t count. People who worry about the defi- ciencies of machine-graded multiple- choice tests sometimes advocate replac- ing them with essay tests, on the model of the twenty-five-minute writing sec- tion that was added to the S.A.T. last year. Schaeffer said, "The so-called new S.A.T. is just a marketing gimmick. And the way the College Board grades essays, they might as well use machines." The board's human graders (mostly moon- lighting teachers) are taught to use a method that the board calls "holistic" and that Schaeffer calls "a cyber sweat- shop": the graders spend about two or three minutes reading a digital copy of each essay (scanned by Pearson), then grade it immediately, on a scale of zero to six. The College Board tells readers to base their evaluations on things like "clear and consistent mastery," but the truly decisive criterion may be simpler. Last year, Les Perelman, who is a di- rector of the undergraduate writing pro- gram at M.I.T., reviewed a number of scored essays. "I discovered that I could guess an essay's prescribed score just by looking at its length-even from across " h a room, e wrote. As for the current scandal, one sig- nificant issue that most people seem to have overlooked concerns S.A.T. scores that the College Board has not changed: those of the more than six hundred stu- dents who took the same test and were given scores that were too high. The board's rationale for letting those scores stand, a spokesman said last week, was that test-takers shouldn't be punished for the improper scanning of their an- swer sheets. But test-scoring errors are a zero-sum game. Giving students er- roneously high scores is no different, ei- ther in principle or in effect, from giv- ing students erroneously low scores, since both mistakes create an unfair ad- vantage for one group of test-takers at the expense of another. Schaeffer said, "I think that the decision not to reduce scores was a very shrewd calculation by the College Board not to create more plaintiffs." -David Owen